A video picture is encoded into one or more non-overlapping slices and each slice contains an integer number of macroblocks. There are five types of coded slices in H.264 (see Table 6.1 of lain E. G. Richardson, H.264 and MPEG-4 Video Compression: Video Coding for Next-generation Multimedia, John Wiley and Sons, 2003). Further, there are some video processing applications that modify an H.264/AVC encoded video. Digital watermarking is one such application. Unfortunately, the application of digital watermarking can cause objectionable artifacts in display video images. Consequently, a need exists to predict, characterize and prevent objectionable artifacts associated with digital watermarking.